The present disclosure relates to a laminated inductor.
An inductor, an important passive device configuring an electronic circuit together with a resistor and a capacitor, may be used as a component configuring an LC filter removing noise or as a component configuring an LC resonance circuit.
An inductor may be manufactured by winding or printing a coil around a ferrite core and forming electrodes at both ends of the core, or by printing an internal conductor on a magnetic or dielectric sheet and then laminating the sheet.
The inductor may be classified according to the structure thereof. For example, the inductor may be classified as a winding inductor, a thin film inductor, a laminated inductor, and the like. Among them, laminated inductors have been widely used.
According to the related art, a winding inductor is conventionally manufactured by winding a conductive coil around a core formed of a magnetic material.
Since, in the winding inductor, a ferrite core is manufactured by compressing and molding ferrite powder and sintering the molded ferrite powder, mass-production of the winding inductor may be difficult, and the winding inductor may not be suitable for use in a small electronic device due to the large volume of the completed product.
Therefore, use rate of the laminated inductor has increased. The laminated inductor as described above is manufactured in a form of a laminate of a plurality of magnetic sheets or ceramic sheets formed of a dielectric material having low permittivity, that is, a ceramic body.
A coil-shaped metal pattern may be formed on the ceramic sheet, and coil-shaped metal patterns formed on respective ceramic sheets may be connected to metal patterns formed on other ceramic sheets through a conductive via.
The coil-shaped metal patterns may be sequentially connected to each other by the conductive via, thereby forming a coil with a spiral structure.
Some of the coil-shaped metal patterns may have a lead electrode portion led to an outer surface of the ceramic body to thereby be electrically connected to an external electrode.
Recently, a size of the laminated inductor has been decreased in accordance with miniaturization of electronic products, and thus, a size of the metal pattern configuring an interior of the laminated inductor has also been decreased.
As the size of the metal pattern has been decreased in accordance with miniaturization of electronic products, a physical influence may be relatively increased during printing of the metal pattern or laminating of the ceramic sheets. Therefore, it may be difficult to precisely adjust other characteristics of the laminated inductor, including inductance thereof, unlike the related art.
Further, since the kind of device to be required depending on various products is various and is sub-divided, there is a need to develop various sub-models by adjusting an internal design of the laminated inductor implementing characteristics, and at the same time, there is a need to secure reliability of the laminated inductor.